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Comment by Kluggy | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't sloppy. It was just luck that someone noticed a half a second extra latency on the second connection of a newly run sshd process and went down the rabbit hole. Had they just shrugged and moved onto more "important" tasks/deliverables, it would most likely have landed in production across the world.

I'm a tad reminded of https://xkcd.com/705/

We got so lucky here. We won't get lucky every time. We will have a massive breach one of these days.

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I don’t think it was luck. I think some people are so in tune with their systems that investigating an anomaly like this is a frequent occurrence. This particular anomaly just happened to have an explosive ending.

Yes, I have met Andres in real life and I can totally believe that he is that in tune with his system. He wrote that he found this while benchmark PostgreSQL and saw weird load from ssh. He does a lot of benchmarking of PostgreSQL patches.

But I would say it was also luck. If Andres hadn't been benchmarking on Debian Testing (or whatever system he found this on) this might have taken longer time to discover.

It may not sound sloppy if you are used to todays apps and websites but half a second is an eternity in CPU time. Half a second is also very much a significant amount of time compared to normal ssh connection times with low network latency - if not Freund then someone else would have noticed, complained and this would have eventually been investigated. The only luck part here is it taking less than two months for this to happen but the attacker could have prevented this avenue for detection entirely by optimizing the exploit not to slow down the ssh proces.

Kinda like Clifford Stoll!

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